2014: The Year Marketer’s Big Data Gets Real

It’s a super-connected world. Once the last inaccessible frontier for consumer connectivity, airplanes now allow texting while flying based on consumer pressure. These day’s consumers expect to be able to text, talk, go online, and communicate instantly whenever and wherever.

However, simply compiling all this data doesn’t automatically lead to better marketing. Rather, it’s the insights derived from this big data goldmine that influence the decisions marketers make and the actions they take making all the difference.

In 2014, for the first time we’ll see marketers begin using big data to optimize their digital advertising in ways that integrate seamlessly with people’s busy lives generating highly relevant, meaningful interactions. RadiumOne predicts marketers’ data-centric demands will power three major ad tech industry evolutions in the coming year:

Programmatic Gets Smarter

Using programmatic buying marketers can bid on advertising in real time for the opportunity to target an ad to a single consumer at a specific place, time or device. By the end the year, we forsee almost two-thirds of the digital advertising market will be automated using this technology. However, the key to this growth will hinge on the model’s ability to refine itself to maximize data insights.

Those ad tech companies that rely solely on third-party data will decline as the industry shifts towards more valuable first-party data insights and cookie-less forms of targeting. Ad tech companies that incorporate some form of this proprietary data into their technology will bring an added layer of ad intelligence to marketers’ giving them a leg up on the competition and fueling this growth in automation.

Automated Intelligence Rises to the Top

Currently, ad tech companies still fail to demonstrate how their artificial intelligence based on common third-party data available to all brands brings any real value to marketers. In 2014, marketers are onto their ploys and will start seeking out those who are using intelligent software to produce new insights no one else has gleaned by combining their brands first party customer data and linking it with location-based and proprietary data.

Smart marketers will crack the big data code and use these exclusive findings to beat out their competitor’s one customer at a time by making informed decisions on the right course of action to take, at the right time with the right message over the right channel.

Geo Location is a Mobile Game-Changer

This year mobile will finally overcome one of its biggest obstacles for marketers — mapping behaviors between mobile and desktop with the spread of new anonymous cookie-less methods of capturing consumer data insights. As a result, we will see an increasing contingent of marketers able to cross walk mobile consumer information with matching geo-location based data.

This will allow them to hyper-target consumers with real-time mobile ad campaigns before, during and after in-store activity to drive conversions. Geo-location capabilities not only enable advertisers to capitalize on a lead at the right time, but they also offer valuable insights into shopping habits and consumer behavior, data that can be used to fuel future campaigns.

Without data, historically we’ve witnessed firsthand how untargeted advertisements provide little value for consumers and low returns for marketers. While 2013 was the year of big data buzz, 2014 will be the year marketers get real taking every effort to make it truly actionable.

Today’s advertising technologies are ready to meet marketer’s demand, constantly innovating to offer new ways to embrace the powerful insights gleaned from fresh forms of data to reach consumers across various channels.